Conventional agricultural planters are often employed to deposit planting material into soil. Many planters include a material dispensing implement that is towed behind a tractor or similar vehicle for distributing planting material, such as seed, fertilizer, pesticide, and other chemicals and materials, onto a furrowed farmland or similar planting surface. The implement may consist of multiple dispensing units that are supported by a common or shared frame that is towed by the tractor. The dispensing units, commonly referred to as row units, may be grouped into two sets—e.g., a left side set and a right side set.
Efficient crop growth requires that seed be planted in different manners that depend at least in part upon soil conditions, fertilizer employed, seed type and anticipated weather and sun exposure conditions. To this end, a seed planter trench opener disc must be capable of opening a seed trench to a selected depth and accurately placing seeds therein to assure that the seed is in proper contact with the soil.
Existing seed planters include various types of depth adjusting mechanisms to control trench depth. One particularly useful type of depth adjusting mechanism provides gauge wheels that, when in a depth adjusting position, have a bottom wheel surface that generally resides proximate and vertically above the bottom disc edge of an associated trench opener disc. The wheel travels along a field surface and therefore limits disc depth into the soil. In many cases a pair of disc openers are each independently mounted to a dispensing unit which is towed behind a tractor or the like and a separate gauge wheel is mounted to each of the disc openers via an adjustable linkage mechanism so that the vertical height difference between the bottom wheel surface and the bottom disc edge is adjustable. For instance, an exemplary disc-wheel configuration may be adjustable so that the surface-edge difference can be set to between one and five inches.
The gauge wheel runs in relative close proximity to the trench opener disc. In addition to its depth controlling function, for some disc drills, the placement of the gauge wheel close to the trench opener disc also assists in keeping the disc surface clean of soil, mud, or debris buildup. Also, the gauge wheel rides over the soil displaced by the disc as the furrow is being cut to prevent the displaced soil from being thrown.
However, the gauge wheel's close proximity to the trench opener disc is not able to prevent all soil, mud, or debris buildup. Mud and residue is still able to build up on the interior of the gauge wheel and on the trench opener disc during operation due to the gap existing between the gauge wheel and trench opener disc. This mud and residue buildup causes the gauge wheel to become heavy and difficult to remove. Therefore, the gauge wheel must be routinely removed to clean out the buildup. The gauge wheel must also be routinely removed in order to replace high wear items such as the trench opener disc, disk scrapers, firming points and seed shoes.
Therefore, it is desired to provide a gauge arm hinge, which allows a user to rotate the gauge wheel outward from the agricultural equipment for servicing an interior portion of the agricultural equipment and clearing any unwanted residue from the interior, such as the inside of the gauge wheel and the trench opener disc, without removing the gauge wheel entirely.